Every Roman Catholic in Scotland has been urged by the Church to resist the controversial proposals to redefine marriage.
Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, has written to every RC parish in the country saying the Scottish Government does not have a mandate to “reconstruct society on ideological grounds”.
And 100,000 campaign postcards have been printed by the Roman Catholic Parliamentary Office to help parishioners make their views known.
Ideological
The moves signify a fortification in the Church’s opposition to the Scottish Government’s radical plans.
Archbishop Conti said: “The Catholic Church, for one, will not accept it, and indeed will actively campaign against it.”
He added: “Those in Government need to be respectfully reminded that a mandate to govern does not include a mandate to reconstruct society on ideological grounds, nor to undermine the very institution which, from the beginning, has been universally acknowledged as of the natural order and the bedrock of society, namely marriage and the family.”
Unique
His concerns echo those of Philip Tartaglia, the Bishop of Paisley, who warned last week, “marriage is uniquely the union of a man and a woman, which, by its very nature, is designed for the mutual good of the spouses and to give the children who may be born of that union a father and a mother.
“For obvious reasons, a same-sex union cannot do that. A same-sex union should not therefore be called marriage.”
Rewrite
Last week the Free Church of Scotland added its voice to that of the Roman Catholic Church in speaking out against moves to rewrite the definition of marriage.
The Free Church Commission said that to change the meaning of marriage shows “an irrational determination to force a form of equality upon society which is not rooted in any recognised moral foundation”.